by Dan Carver
The speechwriter has a problem with something. He’s a moany old git with spectacles and long, wavy hair.
“I just think that the Minister for Agriculture would give the statement, Sir. It’s an Agriculture-related kind of thing.”
“I don’t care,” answers Malmot, his nose buried in a weapons systems catalogue. “That lot out there, they certainly don’t care. Anyone who might will be intoxicated. Anyone who did is mad. You. You are the only person in this entire country who cares.”
“But attention to detail, Sir, it’s…”
“Not necessary when the public has the attention span of a three-year old. A stupid three-year old.”
“But we’ve got a Minister for Agriculture here. Why aren’t we using him? It doesn’t make sense, Sir.”
“Does anything we’re going to say today make sense? Sure, there’s a sort of pseudo-logic underpinning it all, but it’s really just offensiveness for its own sake.”
“But...”
“You’ve got to play to your audience, boy. We’re dealing with the indigenous Englishman. Outrage is all these brain-dead chav goobers can express. Except pride in their own stupidity, of course.”
Now we jump to the Main Hall, Le Monde Exhibition Centre and an assembled cast of press, policemen and punters: human effluent in general.
“So let’s just recount what we know about Davenport,” says the white-haired reporter in the grey trench coat to the camera wrapped in barbwire. “The man, not the crockery! Ah hah! Well, he’s a man on a mission. But does that mission extend beyond redecorating Downing Street? Detractors say he’s all roundabout and no horses. ‘Where’s the policy behind the rhetoric?’ Supporters, however, claim…”
“Previously,” says the concrete-haired female reporter with the alcoholic shakes to the large camera armoured with riot shields, “Davenport was best known for his role as Shadow Foreign Secretary – regarded as the most pointless job in politics by many, given our country’s status as the leper of Europe.”
“So far,” continues the white-haired reporter, “Davenport’s time in Opposition has been characterised by a distinct lack of dramatic action – exactly what we’d expect from a stop-gap leader who...”
“What’s the problem?” drawls the paralytic cameraman.
“I was going to say he poses no real threat to the Prime Minister. But I don’t know who the Prime Minister is anymore.”
“Just start mouthing a name and I’ll jerk focus like someone’s bumped into my arm,” says the cameraman, swigging on a container of meths.
“Davenport!” bawls the reporter in the bright red suit from the late night gossip show to his co-presenter’s breasts, “What do we know about Davenport? What do you want to know about him? Well, he’s here to give some kind of big speech… but let’s forget about all that boring stuff, eh Roxy? Here’s three facts you may not know about our possible future Prime Minister!”
Roxy’s lilac contact lenses home in on her autocue.
“Fact One:” she slurs, her swollen red mouth chomping up and down on some words. What’s she using for lipstick? Car paint? You could listen to her talk but you’d regret the effort afterwards.
“And they say men have the damaged chromosome,” says Malmot charmingly as we watch from a discreet balcony.
Roxy’s red-suited companion looks like he spreads diseases round fashionable gatherings.
“There’s simply no reason for that man to exist!” Malmot fumes. “Nail him to a cross and boil him alive in raw shit. At least that way he’ll provide some entertainment.”
Roxy throws back her head like a howling wolf.
“Doooooooon’t quote me on that!” she bawls, and they head off to exchange genital parasites in the toilets.
I’m wearing a false moustache, but it’s unlikely anyone would recognise the hero of Battencross Manor anyway. I’m just not that impressive lined up alongside barely legal TV presenters with drug habits and Tourette’s.
The conference centre buzzes beneath us, the atmosphere tense like a hanging. Who’ll die today, I wonder.
The Nation’s alcoholism works in our favour. We want them ill-informed and irrational. We’ve our own journalists, ready to deploy, but there’s no need just yet. The independent press are doing us proud. Wonky-bollocked bullshit’s been mislabelled as Fact. Diagrams legitimise distilled-conspiracy theory and a mix of half-truths and downright lies ensure our walnut-brained audience has stoked itself into a drunken rage. There’s a very real threat of violence – if we handle things correctly – and a sense that something truly terrible is about to happen.
The public being the public have decided that whatever Davenport’s going to say, they won’t like it. So they line the auditorium with blank banners and paints, ready to protest against ‘it’ the moment they know what ‘it’ is.
Prowling the aisles is the self-same child who tried to flog me a pistol on my hospital trip, now selling rotting veg at exorbitant prices to dissidents and old reactionaries alike. Credit cards accepted. And, for cash, you can get a nice little half-brick. And, for a banknote of the right denomination in the pocket of the right person, there’s always an upgrade to a ringside seat. If you can’t inflict a head wound from that distance, there must be something wrong with you.
Our speechwriter’s looking nervous, twisting his long, wavy hair and blathering about ‘context’ and so on and suchlike. We all laugh when he mentions ‘believability’.
“It’s too late now,” I tell him, grinning.
Malmot ‘s looking at me. He’s cackling to himself. Am I really that funny?
“Well, we’ve wound up the right-wingers simply by being here,” he laughs, “but Davenport’s crowd are lefties.”
“Tolerant bastards!” I swear. “You’ll have to go some to offend those sons of bitches.”
“Hah!” goes Malmot. “Now, the second best way to wind up a lefty is to tell them they can’t have something. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t even matter if it exists or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s dangerous and it might kill them. Tell a lefty he can’t have a hat full of sea snakes and he’ll run round with a placard and an earnest whine until he gets one. It doesn’t matter about the poor sea snakes, who might not want to be in a hat. It’s the lefty’s right to have a hat full of sea snakes that counts. And he’ll carry on pounding that fact into you until his flesh bubbles up in venom-filled fistulas and his heart explodes. Then God help the poor children with ouija boards hoping to contact Satan. It’s yawns all round as our lefty’s ghost gets through and treats them to an inconclusive report thanking the snakes for their public-spirited cooperation.”
“What’s the first best way?” I ask dumbly.
“Just watch,” he tells me.
“Watch what?”
“Watch this!”
Okay. I realise that for someone who claims to have no feelings, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about them. That was a mistake. I don’t want your sympathy. I certainly don’t want your empathy. You start empathising with me and you might start acting like me. And then you try moving into my territory and I have to kill you. Horribly.
But I would like to think you could share in my malicious pleasures. And, as far as things-that-shouldn’t-be-fun-but-are go, this is a pretty special moment.
Now, I never got to be a proper father. I’ve never had a child reach adulthood thanks to the CIA. So this is as close to seeing one of my kids in a school play as I get. (Bactrian in Knightsbridge doesn’t count; I had the delirium tremens at the time.)
I watch as my three undead children ascend the stage, resplendent in their shiny electric wheelchairs: Davenport; Churchill and the woman I now find is called Laeticia Veetabycs.
Cheers and jeers rend the air and my heart swells with pride knowing that something I’ve created should be having such a profound influence on complete strangers.
“I’m finally having an effect on the world,” I whisper to myself.
“You’ve
scribbled your first penis in the wet cement of History,” says Malmot, eyes aglow. “This is the dawning of the Death of Democracy!”
“Sounds like a song,” I say, and we drawl our way through a few cynical refrains, sung to the tune of ‘Age of Aquarius’. You could almost call it ‘teambuilding’. But our disillusioned speechwriter wants none of it.
“Poor boy,” Malmot teases. “What a terrible thing it must be to have political convictions.”
Laeticia Veetabycs rolls up to the specially lowered podium. Our sound technician presses play on his laptop and, by the time an unconvincing female voice has finished renouncing all her previous beliefs and advocated rearmament as a means of boosting the economy, we know we’re on for a riot.
“Face it,” she says. “Guns create job vacancies. …In all sorts of ways.”
Nelson Churchill does nothing to calm the waters. I don’t recall what he says, but I remember Speechwriter crossing himself and asking the Lord for His forgiveness.
“If you’re worrying what God thinks of your script,” says I, ever the sermonising atheist, “you should have asked him to proofread it. Then it’s His own damn fault if he’s too busy killing children in a famine, somewhere, to give it the once-over.” And damn the little pen-pushing bastard if he doesn’t curse me for a son of Satan.
Back to the stage and Davenport’s vainglorious entrance – all blaring fanfares and electricity-guzzling lighting effects to drive the environmentally-minded audience into a state of apoplexy. Lasers shoot party logos across the ceiling. A back-projected screen shows Opposition propaganda, intercut with our own split-second subliminal calls for violence, public nudity and spontaneous defecation. You don’t want to know what we’ve put in the smoke machines.
“My friends…” Davenport crackles over ear-rending levels of profanity.
“Tread water,” Malmot tells the sound technician.
“My friends, if we could just have a moment’s quiet…” says Davenport.
Malmot signals with a cigarette lighter and black security helmets seep into the crowd like rogue cells in a bloodstream. Short bursts of violence secure an uncertain silence punctuated only by the weeping of children. The technician gets the go ahead and we’re back in business with some affable preamble and a few lame jokes. You know the deal.
“Raise the pace,” says Malmot and the technician nods.
“Reedon Gifford!” Davenport growls. “Whilst Gifford’s end was terrible and extremely regrettable – let us make no bones about that –
his part in our nation’s decline extends far beyond the explosive tangerine he rammed up his rectum. Like so many right-wingers before him, he galvanised support by uniting the populace in a shared hatred. He planted the seeds of endemic, institutionalised xenophobia. It was a crop that his successors harvested and saw our complete and total ostracism from the European Union.”
Murmurs of support from the audience.
“See,” says Malmot, “all good lefty stuff.”
“We were thrown a lifeline,” Davenport continues. “Unfortunately, the test of our loyalty to the common European cause, to assist with the economic rehabilitation of Hungary, was something of a poisoned chalice. It is a regrettable fact that a country’s most marketable export may not be to everyone’s taste. And, whilst I abhor the exploitation of women, whilst I wholly support the rights of the individual to practice faiths with doctrines of a more stringent nature, I suspect that we would have been best served steering away from the moral high ground and extending a helping hand to our Hungarian pornographer friends. We’re all born naked, after all. If by ensuring the job security of people who choose to remain naked, we can keep bread on the table and food in our children’s mouths, isn’t that a good thing?”
This doesn’t please the politically correct factions, but Davenport ploughs on. As much as a dead man can be said to plough, that is.
“And so we found ourselves in a situation that even meaningless sexual intercourse couldn’t save. And then, of course, came The Great Separation – with starvation and war as an afterthought.”
“I like it!” Malmot enthuses to the shamefaced Speechwriter.
“Our children grow up – and I use the term loosely – malnourished and physically and intellectually stunted. Poor nutrition claims increasing lives year on year – more so this decade than the last two put together. This is intolerable.”
Somebody claps. Half-heartedly.
“It is a government’s duty to provide for the electorate,” says Davenport, to which Malmot shakes his head.
“Hah! Well, no, it’s the public’s duty to work for the furtherance of the State.”
“It’s our role to provide solutions to problems that the general public are ill-equipped to deal with,” says Davenport. “But, to provide a solution, we must find it first. And to do that, we must be prepared to think the unthinkable and turn it into an unthinkable reality. Because politics is not a popularity contest. Because it’s the bitter pill and not the sugar bullet that cures the illness!
“Now, I hope I’ve impressed upon you the severity of our predicament. We’ve no more options open; no lifelines left. It’s time we took that bitter pill. It’s time we take our medicine!
“Now, contrary to speculation and misinformation the solution is not donkey meat. No matter what the government may think, there simply isn’t enough! Extincting a species is a short-term fix that leaves us more desperate than before. The donkey is our last untainted resource. It must be nurtured and protected. Anything we harvest from it must be replenishable. Yes, ‘replenishable’ is the key word here!”
What’s that phrase? The one about the silence at the centre of the storm? Well, Davenport’s sitting in it.
“Milk…” he says, which is enough for the vegans, who start the first big push for the stage. Little do they know…
“Yes, milk is replenishable,” Davenport continues, “it contains calcium and it’s very good for you. But we’re also going to need protein, and a ready source of protein is… is Semen!”
Malmot collapses into hysterical laughter and Speechwriter was right to damn me for a devil because I’m deriving yet more enjoyment. The sight of an auditorium of furious little fuckwits, fuming over our malicious concoction – it fills me with something that could be joy.
But heads crack, limbs snap and hysteria breaks loose. Bricks batter brains, bats break backs. Folk lose their footings and ribcages explode under tumbling bodies; breath lost is never regained. The auditorium becomes a Martian world: a sea of writhing limbs; a sky solid with putrefying fruit.
But nothing stops the sloganeers. Oestrogen Proactive parade with banners daubed with tadpoles and ‘We’ve Swallowed Enough!’ and the chant rings out:
“Spunk…no thanks!
We won’t drink wank!
Spunk…no thanks!
We won’t drink wank!”
An order goes out and Davenport rolls to the rear of the stage, sheltering from vegetables and the smaller, more metallic forms of objection exploding left, right and centre.
“Okay,” Malmot tells the technician. “Let’s get ridiculous.”
“The semen,” starts Davenport, “can be removed in the same manner as the milk. With, er, specialised machinery. This will, of course, mean jobs for experienced farm workers and we intend to keep productivity high with a series of experimental initiatives.”
“Donkey Porn!” comes a cry from the audience. “No to the exploitation of female donkeys!” cries a red-haired woman I seem to recognise.
‘Donkey Rape! Coming to a Town Near You!’ reads a slogan on an ethnic print poncho held by her male companion; and they rally the crowd with increasingly ludicrous accusations.
“I think you know those two,” says Malmot with a smile. “Oh, the joy of Agitation! I learned everything I know from Oswald Mosley.”
“I said nothing about animal pornography!” Davenport pleads. “With an ever-growing livestock population and the inevitable impr
ovements in milking techniques, we intend to have two billion gallons by the year…”
And then the real carnage starts.
“Wind it up,” Malmot gestures and a snatch squad retrieve Davenport from the stage. “Arm yourselves,” he barks. “We’re leaving!”
But he doesn’t say which direction we’re leaving in. Every path’s choked with blunt-object-wielding maniacs – and I include the police in that definition. They’re kind enough to carve us an exit route – through the flying fists and grimacing faces – but they release the leopards before we’ve a chance to use it.
And then it’s every man for himself. And I’m charging down some staircase or other, fast as my legs will carry me. And then I run into Calamine – about a week and a half late by my reckoning. And we don’t stop to greet each other; we just run.
“What happened to ‘tomorrow’?” I pant, remembering our meeting at my house.
He holds up the bloody wound where his little fingernail used to be. I notice he’s running with a limp.
“Staff Appraisal,” he tells me. “A little test of my loyalty.”
“Did you pass?”
“With flying colours. I’ve friends in high places and a twin brother I despise immensely.”
“That’s great,” I say, ear cocked for thundering footsteps, scraping claws and violent screaming. “Now I suggest we run faster.”
And we’re travelling downwards at such a speed that I swear my ears are popping. And we’re out of the fire escape and hiding behind a roof support in the freight area, the blood punching the backs of my eyeballs. My lungs are bursting and my sharp breaths slice through the silence and echo the length of the loading bay. I pull my shirt over my mouth to deaden the noise, but I sound like a steam engine and the world knows it.
Now I’ve fired a gun in combat and I’ve seen the Red Mist turn men into animals. I’ve seen them glaze over and hunt their fellow man like hounds running down a fox. I’ve seen it on the battlefield. Hell, I was seeing it in the playground when I was seven. Violence is always just a hair’s breadth beneath the surface. We’ve cracked that surface and now we’re reaping what we’ve sown.